Thailand allows Myanmar migrant workers to extend visa

Myanmar has reached an agreement with the Thai Ministry of Labour to allow Myanmar migrant workers residing in Thailand for four years to re-enter the country after staying one month in Myanmar, according to the Migrant Worker Rights Network.

The original agreement between Myanmar and Thailand signed in 2003 stated that Myanmar migrant workers with temporary passports were limited to four years in Thailand and were required to return home for three years before returning to Thailand.

CREDIT MWRN

Many migrant workers ended up staying illegally after their visas expired and have been facing exploitations, the announcement from the Migrant Worker Rights Network said.

The Migrant Worker Rights Network, Thai Labor Solidarity Committee, and the State Enterprises Workers’ Relations Confederation of Thailand met with Thai Ministry of Labour on Sunday on the future of Myanmar migrant workers who have reached the four-year visa limit, according to the announcement.

“The workers will face difficulties like in the past if they overstay and become illegal workers after their visas have expired.

ccording to the former system, those who didn’t want to return home will stay here and they will face difficulties. So, now the migrant workers can have ‘peace of mind’ when they only have to stay one month [in Myanmar] instead of three years,” said Ko Tun from the Thailand-based Migrant Worker Rights Network (MWRN).

The announcement stated that Pravit Khiengpol, the Director General of Thai Ministry of Labour made the announcement at the meeting with MWRN on September 1.

Migrant workers can have their visas extended in Mae Sot, Mae Sai, Ranong, and Kanchanaburi.

Pravit Khiengpol was quoted as saying in the announcement that the Thai Ministry of Labour will arrange for the migrant workers to return only after they show documents for having reached an agreement with their employers for salaries, work hours, and social welfare allowances.

The Thai Ministry will release details about this issue on September 5.–

—————

Diplomatic efforts by the Myanmar government to resolve the continuing migrant labour crisis with Thailand af failed so far and according to some observers,  workers coming back home could face lack of employment opportunities in Burma.

 

Four-year work visas held by up to 100,000 Burmese migrant workers in Thailand have expired or are close to ending, and the Bangkok government has sent confused signals about the workers’ fate. Tens of thousands more visas will expire during 2014.

Up to 100,000 Burmese workers could face Expulsion From Thailand

 

 

Officials of Islamic school and neighbours under investigation for alleged arson in Yangon

credit emg

The Islamic scho0l where the incident took place (Photo – Aung Ye Ko/EMG)

Police are investigating the officials from an Islamic school and neighbours for an alleged arson that broke out in Thingangyun Township, Yangon Region on September 4.

The incident started about at 2 am yesterday. Three people attempted three burning sticks applied with engine oil being thrown to the thatch roofed Islam religious school. It took about three minutes, according to earlier investigation of the police.

“As soon as we had known the incident, we rushed to the scene. As we managed to control the situation, nothing further happened. We will continue investigating the neighbours,” said the Police Captain of Thingangyun Township.

The religious school is situated on Yuwa Street in No 2 Ward in Thingangyun Township and its has got two teaching halls. There are 270 students and 34 teachers.

The deputy schoolhead said that they replied to the questions of the police as to the fire incident. The repair permit for the school was submitted to the concerned authorities to replace the thatch roof with the galvanized iron sheet in 1995, but in vain.

“At the moment, schoolhead Khin Aung and two teachers from the religious school as well as five neighbours are being launching investigation by the police, the officials of Township Fire Services Department and the township administrator,” said the Police Captain.

The religious school has started giving lecture since 1980 and most of the residents living in its neighbourhood are Islamists, said the locals.

High-powered weapons found in vacant house THAI-MALAYSIA BORDER-VIDEO

Myanmar official has called on Thailand to speed up demarcation of the two countries’ border for security

BANGKOK, Sept 5 – A high-ranking Myanmar official has called on Thailand to speed up demarcation of the two countries’ border for security and joint development.

In a meeting with Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra at Government House, Myanmar’s upper house speaker Khin Aung Myint also urged Thailand to support the “Two Countries, One Destination” tourism campaign and promote connectivity among Thai and Myanmar people.

CREDIT MCOT.NET

Ms Yingluck threw her support to Mr Aung Myint’s requests on demarcation and joint tourism promotion, saying it would expand trade and private sector investment.

She said the “Two Countries, One Destination” principle would connect not only Thailand and Myanmar, but also with other Southeast Asian countries.

Thailand is keen on drawing both sides of the ocean closer through investment in the mega Dawei industrial project and the Thai government has invited foreign investors to play a role in developing the multi-billion-baht project, said Prime Minister Yingluck.

Regarding the arrivals of Rohingya minority refugees from Myanmar to Thailand, Mr Aung Myint said they were not Myanmar citizens and that Myanmar was not responsible for their entry to Thailand.

They came to Thailand from Bangladesh, he said.

Ms Yingluck said Thailand has given shelter to the Rohingya people in accord with international standards and the Thai government would not allow resistance or minority groups in the neighbouring country to use Thailand as their base for actions against the Myanmar government.

Meanwhile, immigration police in Thailand’s northeastern province of Nong Khai reported that about 105 Rohingya detainees broke out of a detention room in the immigration centre and destroyed closed-circuit cameras. They wanted to leave Thailand for a third country.

Over 100 police officers were dispatched to the protest site and the Rohingya detainees were told through an interpreter to calm down but to no avail.

They continued their violent protest, compelling police to fire rubber bullets to scare them. A Rohingya migrant was slightly injured.

Police said 17 leaders were separated from the group to be confined elsewhere. (MCOT online news)

THEY WANT TO GO 3RD COUNTRY? IC, WHY YOU DON,T ASK OIC OUNTRIES LIKE SAUDI, MALAYSIA, PAKISTAN, IRAN TAKE THEM?

Cartoon Waiyan Taunggyi: MOE THEE ZUN RETURNING ??

(က်ေနာ္သူငယ္ခ်င္းကာတြန္းသားႀကီးေမာ္လျမိဳင္ရဲ႕လက္ရာေလးပါ။အရမ္းသေဘာက်လိို႔တင္လိုက္ပါတယ္)  MOE THEE ZUN RETURNING ??  

MYANMAR NATIONAL FOUND DEAD NEAR PANDAN MEWAH MOSQUE-မေလးရွား၊ စလန္ေဂါ ပန္ဒန္းမယ္ဝါ႔ မူဆလင္ဗလီေက်ာင္းအနီး

မေလးရွား၊ စလန္ေဂါ ပန္ဒန္းမယ္ဝါ႔ မူဆလင္ဗလီေက်ာင္းအနီး တြင္ ၌ ေရေျမာင္းမွလာေသာ အနံ႔ဆိုးမ်ားမွတဆင္႔ ျမန္မာတစ္ဦး၏အေလာင္းကို ယေန႔ ေန႔လည္ ၁ နာရီတြင္ ေတြ႔ရေၾကာင္း ntv7 တြင္ ေဖာ္ျပပါသည္

ေသဆံုးသူ၏အမည္ကိုေဖာ္ျပမထားဘဲ ၃၇ ႏွစ္ရိွျပီး ၊ ေသဆံုးသူမွာ လြန္ခဲ႔သည္႔သံုးရက္က ဓါးဒဏ္ရာ ဆယ္ခ်က္ထက္မကရရွိေသာ ဒဏ္ရာ ျဖင္႔ေသဆံုးေနျပီး

၄င္းႏွင္႔သက္ဆိုင္ေသာ စာရြက္စာတမ္းအျခိဳ႕ကိုေတြရိွရျပီး

ေသဆံုးသူမွာ လူအုပ္စုဖြဲတုိက္ခိုက္ျခင္း ခံရဖြယ္ရိွေၾကာင္းရဲတပ္ဖြဲ႔ကေဖာ္ျပပါသည္။

thutatuam

 

In Selangor, a foul stench emanating from a drain led to the gruesome discovery of a body near a mosque in Pandan Mewah, Ampang at 1pm today.

Police, who rushed to the scene after being alerted by residents said the victim, believed to be a Myanmar national, was found with his throat slashed and multiple stab wounds on his body.

According to authorities, the 37-year-old victim, who had been stabbed more than 10 times, died at least three days ago.

His personal documents were also found at the scene.

Police have yet to determine the motive but believed that the victim had been chased by a group of assailants before he was stabbed to death.

The case is being investigated for murder.

 http://www.ntv7.com.my/7edition/local-en/MULTIPLE_STAB_WOUNDS_MYANMAR_NATIONAL_FOUND_DEAD_NEAR_PANDAN_MEWAH_MOSQUE.html#sthash.y2jMKhqH.ZExMhy5K.dpuf

MoeMaKa Monthly Magazine – 09-2013

View this document on Scribd

LAOS: Letter from Sombath Somphone’s wife on the International Day of the Disappeared

Today (August 30) is the International Day of the Disappeared. Shui Meng has shared the following letter with friends and colleagues to call attention to this terrible practice.

A number of groups and media organisations are doing research on the number and nature of Enforced Disappearances in Laos. If you have any verifiable, documentedevidence, please share it.

Dear All,

August 30 marks the International Day of the Disappeared. In many Asian countries, there are activities marking the day to show solidarity with the victims of Enforced Disappearances.

Although Laos is a signatory to the UN Convention Against Enforced Disappearances, and many other human rights conventions and protocols, and despite receiving substantial assistance from development partners for awareness and capacity building on HR issues, there is little awareness or even recognition that Enforced Disappearance is an HR issue in Laos.

In fact, in HR terms Enforced Disappearance is considered the “Mother of HR Violations” because a disappeared person is a “non-person,” and until the person’s whereabouts and proof of life or otherwise are known, the family is left in limbo; left waiting without any possibility of “closure”; left hanging between hope and despair. Nobody, except those who have experienced such violations, can even describe the agony and trauma they face every minute of the day, and outsiders can never understand those feelings and emotions.

စက္တင္ဘာ မနက္ ၅ နာရီေလာက္မွာ မူခင္းတပ္ဖြဲ႔ဝင္မ်ားက စလန္ေဂါ စကင္ခ်န္ ရိွ ဆီအုန္းေတာ မွာ ရာဇဝတ္မူ႔မ်ားနဲ႔ပတ္သက္ဆက္ႏြယ္တဲ႔ တယ္လို႔သံသယရိွသူ ၆၆ ကို ဖမ္းဆီးစစ္ေဆပါတယ္

စက္တင္ဘာ မနက္ ၅ နာရီေလာက္မွာ မူခင္းတပ္ဖြဲ႔ဝင္မ်ားက စလန္ေဂါ စကင္ခ်န္ ရိွ ဆီအုန္းေတာ မွာ ရာဇဝတ္မူ႔မ်ားနဲ႔ပတ္သက္ဆက္ႏြယ္တဲ႔ တယ္လို႔သံသယရိွသူ ၆၆ ကို ဖမ္းဆီးစစ္ေဆပါတယ္

၆ ေယာက္ ဟာ ေက်ာင္းေျပးသူမ်ားျဖစ္ျပီ ၂ ဦးမွာနိုင္ငံျခားသားျဖစ္တယ္လို႔ဆိုပါတယ္

အားလံုးကို စဘာ႔ဘာနန္ စခန္းကိုေခၚသြားျပီး ေဆးစစ္မူ႔ျပဳလုပ္ၾကာင္း စလန္ေဂါ ရဲတပ္ဖြဲ႕သတင္းအရသိရိွရပါတယ္

thutatuam
(ပါမစ္မဲ႔မ်ားမဟုတ္ပါ)

UNFC and UNA forms committee to draft federal constitution

CREDIT EMG

The United Nationalities Federal Council (UNFC) and the United Nationalities Alliance (UNA) have jointly formed a committee to draft a federal constitution.

The committee will be led by Lt-Gen Anbanla, the chairman of the UNFC, Kunman Koban, the chairman of Union National League for Democracy (UNLD) (LA), Khun Tun Oo, the chairman of Shan Nationalities League for Democracy and Aye Tha Aung, the chairman of Rakhine League for Democracy.

The leader of drafting the federal constitution is Colonel Khun Okka. The assistant leaders are Sai Nyunt Lwin and Myo Win and Naing Li Khun is the secretary. Internal and external legal advertisers number nine. The federal constitution bill will be compted in drafting by 2013.

The groups have met twice in Thailand from July 29 to 31. Another meeting was held August 1, during which the ethnics and democratic forces agreed to draft a federal constitution.

First point is to establish federal system, the second, not to accept the 2008 Constitution because of going against basic principles of democracy and federation constitution and the third, to allow experts, women and youths to participate in the draft of the federal constitution. A steering committee will be set up to work on this , said Aye Tha Aung.

The drafting of the federal constitution will depend on the constitution bill, which is being drawn up by members of the UNLD who had been abroad for 20 years, members of the NCUB, ethnics and legal experts. The federal constitution will be a principle for the UNFC and the UNA to follow.

If the government and the UNFC meet, the federal constitution will be presented to them. The next thing is that if Panglong-like conference is held, the UNFC and the UNA will put forward the federal constitution draft. The last thing is that if the Constitution Review Committee amends something in the 2008 Constitution, it will be submitted to the parliament, said Aye Tha Aung.

The Joint Committee for Constitutional Review was formed with proportional representatives from political parties in addition to the 25 Defense Service representatives. The review committee will submit a report on its findings to Union Parliament before December 31 this year.